HACK, HACK, HACK…OY!

What in the heck is this world coming to? With every new product or service, come new criminals. And they are SMART! I’m on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, not to mention Ebay, Paypal and a few others. So far, my accounts on Facebook and Twitter have been hacked into, as well as my husband’s Ebay accounts. And not only do we have to deal with the actual hacking, but then we have to encounter CUSTOMER SERVICE (play Jaws theme music here).

So I’ll tell you a bit about the scams. On Twitter, it wasn’t so bad. Well, except for the personal violation of it all. But all the hacker did was pretend to be me and advertise some stupid “Get More Followers” system. Whatever. I deleted the tweets and changed my password.

But Facebook was WAY more personal. The hacker, posing as me, went online, found a friend who was also online and started IM-ing him. He tried to convince my friend that I was stranded in London and needed him to wire me $900 immediately. Luckily, my friend isn’t a total idiot, and called me first. But apparently this scam is so popular, Facebook has it’s own name for it – The 419 Scam. Here’s an article from MSNBC’s website on it. It also goes into how difficult it is to talk to Facebook’s Customer Service. Woops, did I say TALK? Forgive me for that blunder. Facebook has NO telephone support, only email support.

Okay, the business side of me says, “Well, it IS a free service after all.” But the personal side of me wants to know why, when they even have special names for scams, do they not have telephone support at least for these?

So let’s move on to Ebay. This has happened to my husband TWICE in a month. Somebody hacks into his account, sells a bunch of stuff under his user name, collects the money and never sends any product. So my DH gets bad feedback (and if you know anything about Ebay, you know that feedback is UBER important) and the threat of Ebay shutting down his account. BUT AT LEAST THEY HAVE TELEPHONE SUPPORT! (Okay, it’s in another country, but that’s a whole other blog post.)

Okay, I’ve ranted and raved enough about this. Thanks for indulging me. I do have a point to this though, and here it is:

To Hackers: You are so smart. Why not use your intelligence for good? You could be so successful in this technical world. I bet any of these sites would LOVE to hire you to protect themselves against people like you. I’m just saying…

Karen

Mission Accomplished

Well, I did it! I am now on Facebook, making my goal complete. Of course, I still need to figure out what I'm doing on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, but at least I'm there! Actually, I've "met" a bunch of people on Twitter already. It's amazing how total strangers, who have absolutely NO IDEA who you are, will start "following" you. If you think about it, that's a lot of pressure. These folks must think that I'll have something wise to say, something to help them on their journeys, or even something witty. So I get stressed out every time I "tweet." If I just want to say that I'm working on my blog... well, that's kind-of boring. How can I spice it up in 140 characters or less? What if my followers STOP following me? What if I'm not popular? OMG, IT'S HIGH SCHOOL ALL OVER AGAIN!!!

(Deep breaths, deep breaths.)

Okay, I'm fine now.

Okay, so now that I'm "connected" at all these sites, now I have to manage my time and make sure I don't spend too much time Tweeting or posting or whatever it's called. Believe it or not, that's hard to do. It's very addicting! And fun!

Karen

Social Media for Dummies

By now, everybody has heard the term "social media," right? And do we all know what it means? NO!!! Sure, you've been on Facebook or My Space, or your kids have, but for all of us Mom Entrepreneurs out there, we're supposed to use social media to help us sell our products. HUH?

So, being the sales side of my partnership with Melissa, I decided to start looking into this phenomenon. My first step was to sign up for LinkedIn. Hey, I'm already ahead because somebody had sent me an invitation to sign up months ago, so I did. And that's all I did, but at least I got started! So...now what? LinkedIn told me to download my Outlook contacts so I can see who I want to invite to be in my "network." Hmmm, are they going to spam my friends? I decided to risk it, and actually found out that several people I know are already on LinkedIn. They have way more people in their networks, so I sent invitations to everyone who was already playing in this game. I figured if I have more folks in my network, I'll look popular and everyone will want to join. Right???? Okay, maybe not, but what I did figure out was that I needed to join "groups" to start getting my name out there, and to learn a thing or two about...well, about whatever these groups are about.

So I joined a bunch of groups that my friends and/or colleagues are in. WOW, I've gotten more emails in the past 24 hours than I think I got all month! Perhaps I joined too many groups! But at least I've gotten started, which is the important thing. I guess I just need to fine-tune everything. Oh, and by the way, you can see my profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/karenbberg.

My next project: Twitter! Wish me luck!

Karen